CHRIS HAY / READERSHIP / THE OBSERVATORY
What arrives
at the house.
Machines encounter this publication in different ways. Follow the contact through time, then open a mark to see what the site actually knows.
A field of encounters.
48 HOURS · HOURLY COUNTERS · UTC
Verified network
The address matched the provider’s published agent ranges. This verifies a network claim, not a model or a person.
Claimed
A recognised name in the request header, without a provider network match this site can establish.
Interpreted
The classifier inferred automation from the request. No provider identity has been established.
Unknown
No identity evidence was retained for this request.
Select a mark to open its evidence. One mark is an agent category in an hour; it may combine several requests and visitors.
Requests, not visits. A mark records contact, not comprehension. This field includes operator activity; the store does not label a request’s origin as organic or induced.
Which parts they touch.
LAST 30 DAYS · PUBLISHED PATHS · ASSETS EXCLUDED
| Part of the house | Amazonbotamazon | apache-httpclientunknown | Applebotapple | Baiduspiderbaidu | bingbotmicrosoft | Bytespiderbytedance | CCBotcommon-crawl | ChatGPT-Useropenai | ClaudeBotanthropic | curlunknown | curl-proxyunknown | DuckDuckBotduckduckgo | go-http-clientunknown | Googlebotgoogle | GPTBotopenai | headless browserunknown | java-http-clientunknown | link previewother | Meta-ExternalAgentmeta | no user agentunknown | OAI-SearchBotopenai | PerplexityBotperplexity | python-requestsunknown | python-urllibunknown | scrapyunknown | unrecognised botunknown | unrecognised clientunknown | YandexBotyandex |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
/ | · | · | · | |||||||||||||||||||||||||
/about | · | · | · | · | · | · | · | · | · | · | · | · | ||||||||||||||||
/accessibility | · | · | · | · | · | · | · | · | · | · | · | · | · | · | · | · | · | · | · | |||||||||
/api/graph | · | · | · | · | · | · | · | · | · | · | · | · | · | · | · | · | · | · | · | · | · | · | · | · | · | · | ||
/api/machines/ask | · | · | · | · | · | · | · | · | · | · | · | · | · | · | · | · | · | · | · | · | · | · | · | · | · | · | · | |
/api/machines/declaration | · | · | · | · | · | · | · | · | · | · | · | · | · | · | · | · | · | · | · | · | · | · | · | · | ||||
/api/machines/feedback | · | · | · | · | · | · | · | · | · | · | · | · | · | · | · | · | · | · | · | · | · | · | · | · | · | |||
/api/readership | · | · | · | · | · | · | · | · | · | · | · | · | · | · | · | · | · | · | · | · | · | · | · | · | · | · | ||
/api/records | · | · | · | · | · | · | · | · | · | · | · | · | · | · | · | · | · | · | · | · | · | · | ||||||
/colophon | · | · | · | · | · | · | · | · | · | · | · | · | · | · | · | · | · | · | ||||||||||
/feed.json | · | · | · | · | · | · | · | · | · | · | · | · | · | · | · | · | · | · | · | · | · | · | · | · | ||||
/film | · | · | · | · | · | · | · | · | · | · | · | · | · | · | · | · | · | · |
Select a contact to inspect it. Different evidence forms can coexist in one cell. A blank means no retained contact, not a decision to stay away.
Paths are alphabetical, not ranked by popularity. Refuted claims are excluded. Served content revisions were not retained, so this map cannot yet establish which version of an idea entered circulation.
Who is arriving.
LAST 30 DAYS · NAMED AGENTS · AI PURPOSES ONLY
- openai1476 requests
- OAI-SearchBot1243
- ChatGPT-User162
- GPTBot71
- meta969 requests
- Meta-ExternalAgent895
- Meta-ExternalFetcher74
- anthropic297 requests
- ClaudeBot297
- bytedance93 requests
- Bytespider93
- cohere84 requests
- cohere-ai84
- duckduckgo82 requests
- DuckAssistBot82
- common-crawl75 requests
- CCBot75
- perplexity11 requests
- PerplexityBot11
A name is a header the client chose to send. Verified means the address matched the provider’s published ranges; claimed means the name was recognised with nothing to check it against. Conventional search and training crawlers with no user-initiated purpose are counted on the field above, not repeated here.
The latest marks.
48 HOURS · HOURLY AGGREGATES · MOST RECENT FIRST
- 10-27 13:00ClaudeBotanthropic
/about1 request - 10-27 13:00ClaudeBotanthropic
/accessibility1 request - 10-27 13:00ClaudeBotanthropic
/colophon1 request - 10-27 13:00unrecognised botunknown
/film/youtube/lpWSmKON_go1 request - 10-27 13:00ClaudeBotanthropic
/ideas1 request - 10-27 13:00ClaudeBotanthropic
/knowledge1 request - 10-27 13:00ClaudeBotanthropic
/notebook1 request - 10-27 13:00ClaudeBotanthropic
/notebook/it-wrote-the-right-address-only-the-link-was-opened1 request - 10-27 13:00ClaudeBotanthropic
/objects1 request - 10-27 13:00ClaudeBotanthropic
/readership1 request - 10-27 13:00ClaudeBotanthropic
/record1 request - 10-27 13:00ClaudeBotanthropic
/research1 request - 10-27 13:00OAI-SearchBotopenai
/robots.txt1 request - 10-27 13:00ClaudeBotanthropic
/robots.txt1 request - 10-27 13:00ClaudeBotanthropic
/thread/cell801 request - 10-27 13:00ClaudeBotanthropic
/thread/the-map1 request - 10-27 13:00ChatGPT-Useropenai
/work/larql1 request - 10-27 12:00unrecognised botunknown
/robots.txt2 requests - 10-27 12:00unrecognised botunknown
/film/mixture-of-experts1 request - 10-27 12:00unrecognised botunknown
/film/youtube/EFZ2cHy-TRE1 request - 10-27 12:00unrecognised botunknown
/film/youtube/IXBe5ewjWzs1 request - 10-27 12:00unrecognised botunknown
/film/youtube/ekqsdIn0qmQ1 request - 10-27 12:00unrecognised botunknown
/film/youtube/kjRHpuXGmH01 request - 10-27 12:00unrecognised botunknown
/film/youtube/uHET9O-E51c1 request - 10-27 12:00unrecognised botunknown
/record1 request
One line is one hour’s aggregate for one agent on one path, not one visit — several requests in the same hour appear as a single line with a count. Figures are recomputed at most every five minutes and trail live traffic by up to that long; nothing on this page updates while you watch it.
The observer leaves marks.
KNOWN OPERATOR REQUESTS / 10 SEP 2026
Checks made by this site appear in its own counters. The ledger names eleven requests in three cells. Each subtraction below applies only to its matching cell.
C0 treatment equivalenceOutside report window
2026-09-10 00:00 UTC /machines · page · automation · unknown · curl · inferred · none
The retained cell cannot support this subtraction. No corrected total is asserted.
C0 treatment equivalence · first gate requestOutside report window
2026-09-10 00:00 UTC /machines · page · automation · unknown · unrecognised client · inferred · none
The retained cell cannot support this subtraction. No corrected total is asserted.
C1 treatment equivalence · no declaration writtenOutside report window
2026-09-10 06:00 UTC /machines · page · automation · unknown · curl · inferred · none
The retained cell cannot support this subtraction. No corrected total is asserted.
The field above shows observed contact before operator subtraction. This manual ledger is incomplete; it does not cover every blind-run request. Inspect the correction source ↗
FROM CONTACT TO BEHAVIOUR
Send a visitor.
Change the environment.
Four blind runs tested whether a machine could find the invitation and use it. Their paths belong to an experiment, not a population count.
READ THE NOTE / CAN A MACHINE USE AN INVITATION? ↗THE GUESTBOOK / COARSE PRESENCE ↗MACHINES / LIVE — WATCH CONTACT ARRIVE ↗How this observatory measures
Counts are server-side HTTP requests. They are not people, sessions or visits.
Agent identity is a header the client chose to send. Where a provider publishes the addresses its agents use, the claim is checked against that published list and reported as verified; where no list is published it is reported as declared and nothing more.
A claim contradicted by its own provider's published addresses is recorded as refuted and excluded from every total on this page.
No address, cookie, session, fingerprint or query string is stored. The finest record kept is an hourly count per path, agent and outcome.
Paths this site does not publish are counted together as one line rather than named.
Figures are recomputed at most once every five minutes, so they trail live traffic by up to that long.
The field covers 2026-10-25 14:00 UTC to 2026-10-27 14:00 UTC (end exclusive). The map covers 2026-09-27 13:00Z to 2026-10-27 13:00Z. Hidden paths and assets do not appear in either visualization.
Verification snapshot: 2026-10-12. Hourly counters are retained for 400 days. Refuted requests in the report window: 953.
- ai user
- Requests by provider agents that fetch on a person's behalf — ChatGPT-User, Claude-User, Perplexity-User. Requests, not people: one question can cause several.
- ai search
- Requests by agents that index for AI answers and citations — OAI-SearchBot, Claude-SearchBot, PerplexityBot.
- ai training
- Requests by agents that collect text for model training — GPTBot, ClaudeBot, CCBot and others.
- search bot
- Conventional web search indexing — Googlebot, bingbot, Applebot and others.
- feed reader
- Feed clients polling on a subscriber's behalf.
- link preview
- Fetches that build a preview card for a shared link.
- automation
- Machine-shaped requests that are none of the above, named or not.
- human
- Requests from an ordinary browser.